Why Purpose Falls Apart

Resilience Is A Learned Skill

Ancient Wisdom On Endurance

When Fear And Purpose Collide

Step One: Breathe For Clarity

Step Two: Ask A Better Question

Water Wisdom And Staying Fluid

Step Three: Return Every Time

BRR Method And Closing

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Greetings and welcome. Welcome to the Sweet Spot. It is Wednesday. But not just any Wednesday, it's Win It All Wednesday here on the Sweet Spot. We don't call it Hump Day. We call it Win It All Wednesday. Thank you for joining me. I'm your host. I'm Dr. Derek Sweet. I'm a board certified psychiatrist, but more than that, I am your teammate. Yes, I am your teammate in the game of life. A game that we play every single day here on the Sweet Spot. And it's my joy and special privilege to be alongside you. We are in a series called Full Purpose Living. We've been understanding and unpacking purpose to see how it can fuel our day-to-day existence and make us the best version of ourselves ever. So, sweet spotters, Monday you found your fire. We spoke about passion. Tuesday, you picked up the map. We talked about understanding, particularly understanding ourselves. We saw that passion and understanding are critical to purpose. And today the road gets a little hard. And I want to be honest with you about something right at the top. Most people get to exactly this point. They find out what they're called to, okay, they understand that. And they have an understanding too of why they are the way they are. They feel the momentum building, they have passion and they have understanding, and then something happens. The results don't come fast enough. Someone in their life doesn't get it. The old pattern, the old behavior, the old ugly habit knocks on the door again. And quietly, without even making a conscious decision, they start pulling back away from their purpose and going back to what's familiar. Today is about making sure that doesn't happen to you. Because what you need right now, what bridges the gap between knowing your purpose and actually living it when things get hard is this. It's resilience. Yes, resilience. And they don't teach you this in school. I wish there was a course on resilience in college, maybe even high school. Resilience is not a personality trait. No, not at all. It's not something you either have or you don't. I used to think that a while back. It's not reserved for people who had easier starts or harder starts or any particular kind of start. No, resilience doesn't have anything to do with that. Resilience is a practiced response. Can you believe that? It's practiced. It's a set of skills built deliberately, strengthened every single time you use them. And I'm gonna give you, sweet spotter, exactly how you build them starting today. We've all heard resilience, and we all use the term, and it feels nice. Bounce back, uh fight back, never give up. Okay, I get it, I get it. But look, has anybody ever sat down and had an open discussion with you about resilience and said to you, okay, here uh how you build the skills. I know I haven't had it. And the ancient wisdom, you know, here on the sweet spot, more about science, soul, and success. So we never not include the ancient wisdom. Yeah, Isaiah in the ancient wisdom wrote something that has steadied people in their hardest moments for thousands of years. And you're gonna this is such a all the classic Christians out there are gonna love this one, right? This is very simple. But they that wait on God, they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up on wings like eagles. They shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint. Very famous, very classic line from the ancient wisdom. Waiting on God, renewing your strength, mounting up with wings like an eagle, running and not being weary, walking and not fainting. Here's what that's really saying. The strength gets renewed in the middle of the struggle, and the wings come while you're still in the storm. You don't get wings before the hard thing, you get them by staying in the hard thing. Took me years to understand that. You know we love stoicism here on the sweet spot. Marcus Aurelius, who governed an empire while managing plagues and wars and even navigating personal loss, he wrote in his private journal something that he probably did not intend for anybody else to ever read. It was his private journal. He said the impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. There's a book, I think it's Ryan Holiday. It's the obstacle is the way. Literally, whatever's blocking you has to become the way. You don't back down. What stands in the way becomes the way. Not a detour, not an obstacle to go around. No, no, no. No, the friction itself, the resistance, the pushback, the challenge, the slow results, the doubts of the people, the haters, all of that. The people who don't fully understand what you're building, that is the path. That is the way. You don't back down from that. You don't run away from it, you don't try to get around it. That becomes the way. And let me make that real for you. Think about the passion we talked about on Monday. That we tied into purpose. Think about the belief you named on Tuesday that has been quietly holding you back. We talked about that. Now think about the moment, and you know exactly which moment I'm talking about, when the two things collided. When your purpose pulls you forward and your fear pulls you back, and you're standing in the middle of that tension. Have you ever been in those kind of moments where you know it's kind of like this is your purpose is pulling you this way and your fear is pulling you the other way? And you're kind of in the middle of that tension, not knowing which way you're really gonna go. That moment, that moment right there, that is where resilience, our word for today, lives. And here's exactly what to do when you find yourself in that moment. Step one. Breathe before you decide anything. You know here on the sweet spot we always stop and take a deep breath. When pressure hits your body, you've got to understand it goes into threat mode. Your cortisol spikes, your thinking narrows, the urge to get out of there, to run like you know what, to flee or to freeze takes over completely as your amygdala, the threat detector, our good friend, the threat detector, starts to go off like an alarm bell when pressure hits your body. And here's the thing: you cannot think your way out of that state. The brain is too flooded at that time to think your way out. You're already in reaction mode. The fight, flight, freeze system has kicked in. But you know what you can control? You can breathe your way back into clarity. Oh yes, you can. Well, guess what? Your breathing is a controllable. And here's how four four four breathing. You ever heard of that? Breathe in for four, hold for four, breathe out for four, pause for four, and breathe back in for four. Four four four four breathing. Yeah. Another one is to just if you if you if you can't get into the four, four, four, four thing, or I get it, just do a nice slow inhale, and then a much longer exhale. So, like you could breathe in for four counts and a hole for one, and then breathe out for six counts. The longer exhale is not a relaxation trick, it directly activates your vagus nerve. The biological off-switch for your stress response. This is really good to know that whenever you exhale longer than you inhale, you are activating a brain system in your parasympathetic nervous system, the vagus nerve, and within 60 seconds, your nervous system begins to shift from threat. From threat mode back into thinking mode. Military folks do this, police officers and first responders do this, surgeons and doctors do this, and athletes do it. Yeah, breathing what you can control can bring you back into purpose, back to your purpose mode. Why don't you do that right now if you can? Just for a second. Breathe in for the count of four, hold it, and then breathe out for the count of six and let go. So, yeah, you can practice your breathing anytime you want, and that will help your resilience and point you back in the direction of the purpose of your performance today. Step two, change the question. Look, it's natural as a human being, right, in a hard moment to say, why is this happening to me? Why is this happening to me? That question locks you in place, sweet father. It has zero useful answers for you, really. It has no useful answer and it keeps you stuck in the problem. Why is this happening to me? Look, you gotta stop that. Resilient people ask a different question. I'm gonna give it to you. It's gonna sound a little strange, but you gotta try it. What is making me what is this? What is this? Let's do it this way. What is this making me capable of? Strange question to ask in the middle of a stressful situation. But that single shift from why me to what for is what psychologists call a growth mindset. And it is the most consistently researched predictor of long-term resilience across every population that has been studied. Because the moment you ask, what is this making me capable of, what is this making you capable of, the brain starts looking for evidence of, yeah, like what is this making you capable of? It looks for evidence of growth instead of evidence of defeat. So instead of why is this happening to me, what is this making me capable of? Is the question. Make sure you write that down. And be sure to ask yourself that because when the brain is asked that, the prefrontal cortex, your CEO, the brain's analytical planner, executive planner, has to deal with that. The amygdala has to calm down for a second because the PFC is gonna work on, huh? I wonder what this is making me capable of. And it will find out what that is. Lao Tzu, whose wisdom has been guiding people through difficulty for over 2,000 years, observe something so simple it almost feels a little too quiet to even matter to be real. Here's what Lao Tzu said. Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away a rock which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. Holy macaroni. I better say that again. Water is fluid, soft, and yielding, but water will wear away a rock which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. You see, water doesn't fight the rock, it doesn't force its way through, it stays, it moves, it finds the smallest opening and keeps going day after day until the rock that seemed so impossible eventually gives way. You know how water is if you own a home or apartment wherever you live. With water once in, it's tough and it can come in so many different directions, right? Yeah, water is nothing to play with, even though it's not as menacing as a rock, it can do quite a lot of work. That is what the second question builds inside of you. This ability to stay fluid, sweet spotter. When everything around you is rigid and hard and looks so impossible and the challenge looks so big. Bruce Lee said, be like water to keep moving, be soft, persistent, purposeful, and relentless toward whatever matters. Even when the movement is slow, even when the results are invisible, even when nobody's watching you do it. Be like water and watch the obstacle crumble. Step three. I'm giving you three steps to be resilient because water has a resiliency, and we talked about that already. You got that, and you got the first one. Do you remember what I said in the first one? Absolutely you do. So let's do the third. The third one here is this. You my friend, you have to return every single time. This is the one most people underestimate with resilience. Resilience is not built in the big dramatic comebacks, it's built in the small daily returns you ignore. Yeah, you fall off, you get back on the horse. You fall off, you come back. You get knocked down, you come back. You get turned around, you come back. The old pattern shows up, you name it, just like you practice on Tuesday, we talked about this on Tuesday, and you come back. Every single time you return, no matter how small, every time you come back, no matter how imperfectly, every time you come back, it registers in your brain as evidence that you are someone who doesn't stay down, that nothing is gonna keep you down, and that evidence accumulates. The moment you can see a pattern clearly, the moment you name it, the moment you trace it and you choose differently to do something different that we talked about, something shifts in your brain that science can actually measure. Yeah, we talked about this whole neuroplasticity thing. The brain is building new neuropathways every time you pause before reacting, every time you choose a new response instead of running the old script. You are literally building new neural pathways, new wiring. Your brain is physically restructuring itself around the new choices you're making right now. That's why you gotta you gotta try, you gotta do it. You're never stuck with the version of yourself that fear built. You can build a new one, one conscious return at a time. Tupac, Tupac Shakur, who rose from some of the hardest circumstances a young man could face and still create his work that moved millions, said you can spend minutes, hours, days, weeks, or even months overanalyzing a situation, trying to put the pieces together, justifying what could have or would have happened. Or you can just leave the pieces on the floor and move on. Leave the pieces on the floor and move on. Wow, I think that's step three made real. He just made step three real. Absolutely. Absolutely deciding to stop, to stop spending your resilience on the past and redirect every ounce of it towards what's ahead. That's returning to what's important. So let me bring it all together. I know I dropped a lot on you. I know that was a lot to take in. I know. Let me bring it together. When the hard moment hits, and it will, you now have three things to do. Breathe first. Four counts in, hold, and then six counts out. Do it as many times as you need it. Let the exhale be longer than the inhale and get your nervous system back online, back on the horse to purpose. So you breathe first and then you reframe second. Don't ask why is this happening to me, but ask what is this making me capable of doing? How is this capacitating me? How is this making me stronger? Huh? Yeah. 100%. Breathe first, reframe second, and then return third. No matter how imperfect, uh no matter how messed up or jacked up it feels. You keep returning imperfectly, immediately, but every single time. You keep returning. Okay. Breathe, return, and refrain. Actually, let me put that in order. Breathe, reframe, return. Sometimes you do have to back it up though. Sometimes you just gotta keep returning until you figure out all right, I gotta breathe. And then you get to reframe. But that's the BRR okay acronym for you. Breathe, reframe, return. That's how you build resilience here on Win It All Wednesday. That's how you allow resilience to help you stay with your purpose. That's how you amplify your passion and your understanding that we covered already. And this is not a slogan, it's a method. And it works because it works with your biology instead of against it. You breathe, you're controlling that nervous system. You reframe, your cognitive mind starts thinking differently. And then you return, you're giving yourself some motor memory, you're sending a message that I can't be back. I'm not gonna be uh held out. Your purpose is not threatened by resistance. You know what it is? It's revealed by the resistance that's coming at you. Every hard moment is showing you something about the depth of what you're called to do. And you have faced many battles, sweet spotter. I know you have. I know you've you faced so many things and you've always come through, and this is gonna be no different. I'm just adding some tools on so that you can be even more powerful. Because that's who you are. Every time you breathe, reframe, and return, you're not just surviving the difficulty, you're becoming the person your purpose has been waiting for. Today you learned that the road gets hard, sweet spotter, and now you have exactly what to do when it does. For science, for soul, and for success, you're in the sweet spot. Come back tomorrow because what we explore next will ask something of you that the first three days have been quietly preparing you for. You gotta come back, you gotta hit me up for Trust Yourself Thursday tomorrow. Until then, please share and subscribe, and be sure to do what? Breathe, reframe, and return. This is Dr. Derek Sweet.